Wrecked

By Mary Anna Evans

Next title in the Faye Longchamp Archaeological Mysteries. When tragedy strikes and everything she loves is threatened, Faye Longchamp, an expert in American archaeology, will resort to desperate measures. Because some losses cut to the bone…

A murder mystery with an archaeological twist, Wrecked is:

• Florida-based mystery
• Perfect for fans of James Lee Burke and Nevada Barr
• For readers of archaeological mysteries

The suspicious drowning death of Captain Edward Eubank breaks archaeologist Faye Longchamp's heart. It also confuses her, because he was found in scuba gear and she's never heard him even mention scuba diving. During their last conversation, he told her that he believed he'd found a storied shipwreck, but when Faye checks it out, she finds nothing there—not a plank, not a single gold coin, nothing. If there's no treasure, then why is her friend dead?

But the situation quickly escalates beyond a murder mystery. Surrounded by a community struggling in the aftermath of a major hurricane that has changed the very landscape, Faye grapples not only with the loss of her friend, but with her fears for her daughter, who is being romanced by a man who may be very dangerous.

As a professional with her own consulting firm, Faye had long ago given up her "anything goes" attitude when the law stood between her and an interesting dig. Now that recklessness is back. There's nothing she won't do to protect her daughter.

In this riveting addition to an archaeological mystery and thriller series perfect for fans of Nevada Barr, Faye must save her most precious cargo—her daughter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781464212536

Mary Anna Evans

Mary Anna Evans is the author of the Faye Longchamp archeological mysteries, which have won the Benjamin Franklin Award, the Mississippi Author Award, and three Florida Book Awards bronze medals. The winner of the 2018 Sisters in Crime (SinC) Academic Research Grant, she is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches fiction and nonfiction writing.

Book preview

Also by Mary Anna Evans

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Relics

Effigies

Findings

Floodgates

Strangers

Plunder

Rituals

Isolation

Burials

Undercurrents

Catacombs

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Books. Change. Lives.

Copyright © 2020 by Mary Anna Evans

Cover and internal design © by Sourcebooks

Cover design by The BookDesigners

Cover images © Lillac/Shutterstock, chrishudson/Shutterstock, FotoKina/Shutterstock

Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks

P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

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www.sourcebooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Evans, Mary Anna, author.

Title: Wrecked / Mary Anna Evans.

Description: Naperville : Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks,

2020. | Series: A Faye Longchamp archaeological mystery

Identifiers: LCCN 2020014718 (trade paperback)

Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3605.V369 W74 2020 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc22

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020014718

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Notes for the Incurably Curious

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Back Cover

For my sister Suzanne

Prologue

The drone flew like a bird, cutting through sea breezes as if it could feel the joy of a living creature. Sometimes it flew high, though not so high as to lose sight of the Florida Panhandle’s battered coastline. Sometimes the drone dove like an eagle and its camera got a close look at colorful fish swimming in water as clear as air.

The fish fluttered through the wrecks of newly sunken boats. Perhaps they remembered the hurricane as they swam below seacraft still able to float. Perhaps they didn’t. The drone didn’t care. It just snapped their picture and moved on.

The drone’s camera captured everything in sight—clean water, broken trees, littered sand, swimming fish, flying birds, and shattered houses—because that is what cameras are made to do. They record everything they see. There is no hiding from them.

When the drone was flying low, its camera caught the faces of exhausted people spreading blue tarpaulins over splintered roofs. It saw the sun-bleached hair of people on pleasure boats, rubbernecking at destruction. It saw the bobbing heads of swimmers brave enough to share the water with floating wreckage. The camera captured light reflected from the silvery backs of sharks and barracudas who swam wherever they pleased.

When the drone was flying high, it captured the contours of the coastline and the fractured light of sun on floodwater and broken glass. It saw the enormity of what the hurricane had done.

What is more, the camera’s images were stamped with a date and time and, over time, the images recorded the movements of each boat. A careful observer could look at the drone’s images and guess where all the boats and swimmers had been and where they might be going next.

If the drone made multiple flights that day, and it did, all of its pictures together gave a sense of the passage of time. The drone knew when the highway running along the Gulf of Mexico had seen heavy traffic that day. It noticed that the same boat had sat here in the morning and there in the afternoon, moving someplace else in the evening before cruising home. With a drone and a bit of ingenuity, an enterprising person could find fishing spots that had been family secrets for generations.

Almost everything captured by the camera was inconsequential, a series of instantaneous incidents that would be forgotten by morning, but not everything. The drone saw a place that had been the home of people long dead, generations of them. Barely visible, the stone outcropping marking its location had been exposed by the scouring waters of a hurricane after years and years under the seabed.

But that wasn’t all. Someone was taking things that belonged to someone else, hoping to get rich. Someone was stealing something irreplaceable.

The drone saw it all.

Chapter One

Chain saws roared. Voices chanted One. Two. Three! as clusters of people lifted chunks of trees too heavy for one person to lift alone. Neighbors cried Thank you so much! as one driveway after another was cleared.

Short and skinny Faye Longchamp-Mantooth was struggling to do her part in carrying the big logs. She had friends who were sleeping in tents where their houses used to be, and she knew how much they would suffer under the broiling July sun. She had begged them to come stay with her, but there were looters prowling Micco County, and they were terrified. They’d rather live outdoors with the mosquitoes than lose the very few possessions that the hurricane had left behind. She struggled to think of ways to help them—fill their ice chests, swap out their propane tanks, bring them food and water—but these things weren’t enough. Nothing was enough, not really.

Faye recognized the peculiar clarity of the sunlight that shines in the aftermath of a hurricane, because she had seen it before. It was as if swirling winds had drawn the moisture right out of the air, leaving nothing but oxygen, nitrogen, and traces of the usual stray gases. She felt as if she could see forever through the clear air, or at least to the point where the Earth curved and hid itself. And everywhere she looked, she saw something that the hurricane had crushed or shredded or twisted beyond recognition.

Faye and her husband, Joe Wolf Mantooth, had been lucky. The hurricane had dealt their home on Joyeuse Island a glancing blow on its way to pummeling Micco County. Eventually, they would need to sweep the roof and replace some missing shutters, but those chores could wait. Whole towns were without electricity and water. Cell phone service was spotty, even for people who had electricity to charge their phones.

The sheriff’s department was stretched thin, because the disaster had rubbed the veneer of civilization right off of some people. Faye had heard about a knife fight over bottled water, right in the middle of a suburban grocery store. With her own eyes, she’d seen three men brandishing handguns as they robbed a convenience store, led by three men brandishing handguns. She thought that Sheriff Rainey had done an excellent job of restoring order. He’d arrested some key players and put his entire staff on overtime. His deputies were constantly visible, prowling rural roads and patrolling Micco County’s tiny towns. Faye felt safer, but she didn’t feel safe.

Hospitals and nursing homes were running on generators, staffed by doctors and nurses who were running on no sleep. Shelters were full and they, too, were running on generators. Micco County wasn’t a wealthy place, so a lot of people had already been living on the edge before they got flattened by nature. Faye and Joe were losing money every day that they did no archaeological work for their clients, but they’d find a way to make their bank accounts last until the crisis passed. People needed their help.

Faye and Joe had strong arms and backs, and they had functional cars that they could use to get supplies to people. Their nineteen-year-old daughter, Amande, had found her own way to help as she drove loads of donated food and water to people too old or sick to get to the distribution points.

Faye had argued against Amande’s plan to make these delivery runs. She’d said, Your father and I are helping people get back on their feet. If you stay at home to take care of Michael so we can do that, you’ll be helping, too.

Faye hadn’t said I feel safer when the two of you are at home. I’d wrap you both in bubble wrap if I could, but it was the truth.

Amande had out-argued her, which was the downside of having assertive and intelligent children. I’ll take Michael to hang out at Sheriff Mike and Magda’s every morning. He’ll be as safe as he is at home. Maybe safer, since Sheriff Mike will stop packing heat on the day they put him in the ground.

Faye knew that this was true. She also knew how strict Mike was about safety when it came to kids and guns. She trusted him to keep everyone around him safe.

Amande was still making her case. I’ll be in a car that you and Dad make sure is perfectly safe, just like I am on any normal day. I’ll only be traveling on roads that have been cleared. Deputies are keeping the roads hot with all their patrolling. Michael and I will be out of your hair, so you and Dad can focus on what you need to do. I really want to do this, Mom.

And so, with her imagination conjuring danger at every turn, Faye had watched her daughter drive away every morning for a solid week. More, actually. She’d mostly lost track of how much time had passed since the storm, but somehow she knew that today was Monday. She mostly knew this because it felt like a Monday.

For days now, Faye had watched little Michael sitting behind Amande in his car seat, and Joe had watched Faye watch them. Every morning, he’d said what she was thinking, and it sounded so ridiculous when he said it out loud that it made her laugh every single time.

There go all our eggs in one basket.

And each time, their laughter calmed her. It made her able to wave good-bye to her children and get to work helping her friends.

The hurricane had taken a human toll—two people had been killed when their car slammed into a fallen tree and two people were still missing—but it could have been much worse. Still, months—years, probably—would pass before life in Micco County was anything like normal again.

Faye and Joe were helping their substitute mother, Emma Everett, and her neighbors clear the downed trees blocking access to their homes. By lunchtime, they’d made visible progress, but Faye’s muscles—biceps, triceps, quads, hamstrings, glutes, all of them—were trembling. It was time to sit down, drink a lukewarm bottle of water, and eat a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich, because peanut butter doesn’t have to be refrigerated and neither does honey.

Joe’s muscles didn’t seem to need rest. He was loping down the street, his long, straight black ponytail swinging like a pendulum. Faye’s own black hair, short but just as straight, was stuck to her brown cheeks with sweat. She was a little jealous of Joe’s energy after the morning’s hard work. She figured that it helped a lot to be made of six-and-a-half rawboned feet of muscle. Five-foot-tall Faye wouldn’t know. And also, he was nine years her junior. Those years might have something to do with the fact that she wanted a nap and Joe looked almost perky.

Joe was on a mission, and it was a mission that Faye would never have imagined for him. Who would have thought of Joe as the passionate pilot of his very own drone? He was beside himself over this chance to make his fanciful hobby useful.

Faye had assumed that Magda and Mike were wasting their money when they’d bought Joe a flying, picture-taking robot for Christmas. She’d figured that it would get about as much use as the food processor she’d been foolish enough to buy him. He’d given her a sweet thank you, then tucked it deep into a cabinet so he could go back to making cole slaw with a sharp knife and patience.

Faye fervently loved her solar panels and the air conditioning they made possible. Joe? Not so much.

He tried to live as close to the traditional ways of his Muscogee Creek ancestors as he could. If it had been practical for people living on their remote island to get along without boats that had motors, Joe would have chucked everything they owned that didn’t exist before the Industrial Revolution. Yet he had bonded to his twenty-first-century flying gadget so completely that he’d given it a name.

And maybe that name, Osprey—Ossie for short—explained Joe’s fascination with his new hobby. Faye thought that Joe loved Ossie because he himself moved easily on earth and sea, but he would never be able to take to the air.

Ossie could fly. The little drone gave Joe a new way to see the natural world that he loved so much. It was probably no coincidence that their son’s middle name, chosen by Joe, was Hawk.

Today, Ossie would be hard at work doing something useful. She—and, yes, Joe had gifted his inanimate flying sidekick with a gender—would be taking aerial photos that would come in handy when their friends needed to do battle with their insurance companies. Since people who live in hurricane zones rarely have much trust in the companies that collect their insurance premiums, everybody wanted Ossie to get pictures of their shredded roofs and totaled cars.

They called out Hey, Ossie! Take my picture! whenever she zoomed by.

A crowd gathered around Joe, cheering as he sent Ossie skyward. She was white, like a living osprey’s breast and head, but she had four white rotors instead of two glossy brown wings. Her four slender legs were as white as her namesake bird’s legs, without the black talons.

As she rose above their heads, the camera attached to her underside looked back at them. Joe expertly manipulated the levers on Ossie’s controller to guide her as she paused over each house to get images of the hurricane damage. Then, just to make them all smile, he sent Ossie roaring away at top speed to get video of the Florida Panhandle’s coastline, still gloriously beautiful under unending piles of debris.

Ossie sped down the coast to the west as far as they could see before Joe steered her out over the Gulf of Mexico and flew her back their way. As she swooped over their heads, the cheers grew louder. Joe was focused on the drone’s controls and on the drone’s-eye view scene on his phone’s display, but not so focused that he didn’t crack a smile.

Faye leaned over his shoulder to watch the images on his phone, which was attached to the drone’s controller so that he could see to steer. It seemed like Ossie’s onboard camera could see forever. Beaches the color of confectioner’s sugar stretched out ahead as she flew far above them. They were strewn with chocolate-colored seaweed and the wood from obliterated boat docks.

To the drone’s left, beyond the damaged beach houses, the phone’s screen showed tall trees, some snapped in half with their topmost branches dragging the ground. Even broken, the pines and cypress trees appealed to the eye, but it was the luminescent water to Ossie’s right that held Faye’s attention.

She had lived on an island for a long time, but she hadn’t gotten used to the beauty of the Gulf of Mexico yet. She hoped she never did.

In the shallows, where long docks and piers had collapsed under punishing waves, the water went from emerald green to spring green, shading quickly to a pure turquoise so clear that she could see objects on the white sand beneath it. An area of murkier water marked the mouth of a broad, deep creek. It also marked the location of the marina that Faye’s family depended on to switch from their boats to their cars, and vice versa, making their island life possible. She enjoyed seeing it from the sky, admiring the stark geometry of the rectangular buildings and straight docks against the softness of nature.

In an instant, Ossie flew beyond the creek and all murkiness left the blue, blue water. Out beyond the barrier islands, the water’s color deepened to a strong aquamarine. If she focused her eyes in that direction, she could imagine that the hurricane had never happened at all.

Just as Joe swung Ossie around one last time, she flew over their home, Joyeuse Island, separated from the green-black coastal swamps by a narrow channel. When the crisis was past, Faye would ask Joe to fly the drone over their island to see whether the hurricane had uncovered more of the old buildings her family had built back in the 1800s. She’d been exploring the archaeological traces left by her ancestors since she was a child, and those happy years digging for historical treasure had made her into the archaeologist she’d grown up to be.

For now, she was happy to stand among her friends and watch the drone return to Joe. Hardly bigger than an unabridged dictionary and not nearly so heavy, Ossie settled herself at Faye’s husband’s feet like a faithful pet.

The crowd applauded, and Joe said quietly, Good girl, Ossie.

* * *

Far away, much too far for Ossie to fly, a woman was running. With a single bag in one hand and a child’s hand in the other, she wondered whether it was even possible to disappear these days. Even her credit card would give her away. And everybody knew there were cameras everywhere.

Chapter Two

Hey! He’s got a newspaper, somebody called out, and Faye looked up from her sandwich. A crowd was forming around a man who’d just come back from a food-and-water run.

Another man’s voice emanated from the cluster of people, calling out, Joe, you’re a star.

A woman spoke up to argue with him. Not Joe. Ossie’s the star.

Faye rushed over to see what they were talking about. There, dominating the front page and above the fold, was one of Ossie’s photos in full, glorious color. She didn’t know when Joe had found time to send it to the newspaper, but he must have done it from home or from his phone during a trip to town, because they certainly had no cell service where they were working at that moment. One of Joe’s fishing buddies, Nate Peterson, was credited with writing the story, which explained how the newspaper even knew Joe’s photos existed.

Below the fold was an article memorializing the dead and the missing. Their photos haunted Faye. Her eyes were drawn to the school photo of an eighth-grade girl. They lingered on the cropped, blurry snapshot of a mother who’d been killed during the time of life when she was always the one taking the pictures. Mother and daughter had died together when a massive live oak toppled in front of the speeding car that was supposed to be taking them to an emergency shelter and safety.

Another photo showed a smiling woman holding her five-year-old son. Both of them had been missing since the storm. It was printed beside a brief article asking for help in locating them. Faye knew that this request was optimistic. They’d gone missing at the height of the storm, when the hurricane had peeled the roof off their double-wide and toppled what was left of it. In all likelihood, floodwaters had washed their bodies into a swamp where they’d be found when the water finally receded.

Faye couldn’t look at their faces any longer. She flipped the still-folded paper over and rested her eyes on Joe’s peaceful photo.

Is our street in the picture? Emma asked. People need to know how bad it is here.

Joe shook his head. Nate wanted a big-picture shot, so I sent him one that I took east of here from pretty high up. He also said they’d been running pictures of torn-up houses all week and he wanted something that showed what the storm did to nature. So I got him a shot that shows the torn-up beaches down toward our house and all the downed trees in the swamp. Look. That sandy point that used to stick out into the water west of Joyeuse Island is just gone. And see those snags piled up in the shallows? People around here are boaters and they’re going to have to navigate around that stuff. Those things will get people’s attention.

Well, I hope their attention strays a little farther inland, Emma said tartly. My house will be fine with a few tarps, but everybody wasn’t so lucky.

Faye raised an eyebrow at her.

Oh, okay. Sooner or later, I’ll need some carpenters and roofers, and maybe a plumber and a couple of electricians, but they’ll get the place livable again. The houses on both sides of mine? They’re gone. And all the people in the trailer park across the highway lost everything, too.

Emma Everett was past seventy now. Her deep brown skin was starting to wrinkle and her cap of tight short curls was more gray than black, but she still funded college scholarships for poor Micco County teenagers, and she still spent her Saturdays tutoring them for their college admissions tests. Her late husband, Douglass, had remembered what it was like to be poor. He would have been proud to see how Emma was using her time and their money.

Your pictures are beautiful, son, and this one reminds people that it’s not going to be so much fun to fish or go to the beach for a while, but that’s not enough, Emma said. You need to tell that Peterson man to come out here himself and interview my neighbors. She swept out an arm that encompassed a bunch of people who hadn’t bathed in days. They’re hurting.

Joe said, Yes, ma’am. I’ll tell him.

Mollified, Emma gave him a big hug and said, I’m proud of you. She pulled Faye in close, so that the three of them could look at Joe’s photo together.

Newspaper images are low-resolution by nature. The photo’s blurred haziness made the damaged coastline look better than it did in real life, like an aging Hollywood actress who had trusted her face to a photographer who knew how to use lighting and filters.

The picture was oriented with north facing up, so the coastline ran along the top edge and water dominated the rest of the photo. Faye’s eyes went straight to her home, Joyeuse Island, hugging the coast in the top right corner and extending off the right side of the photo. The tin roof of their house shone silver through trees that had survived the big fire. A lot of other trees were on the ground. From this altitude, her island looked like a giant had dropped a box of matches on it.

The water just below Joyeuse Island was dotted with a handful of small pleasure boats and a…well, she couldn’t say, but it made her archaeologist’s heart sing for joy. It made her desperate to see the image at full resolution. Her brown eyes found Joe’s green ones, and she tapped her forefinger hard on the photo.

What’s that dark blotch in the water southwest of our house?

Joe’s shrug said he didn’t know what the blotch was, either, but he was grinning. He could see how excited she was.

Faye hadn’t seen it in any of Ossie’s photos taken before the storm. It was slightly smaller than the boats floating nearby. That meant it was probably too small to be that holy grail of underwater archaeology, a shipwreck.

Faye supposed it could be a shipwreck that was still mostly hidden under the sand, but she doubted it. She snorkeled in that area all the time, and she’d never seen anything like a debris trail on the seabed that screamed Shipwreck!

She had, however, found two chipped stone points lying on the sand, as if they were pointing toward something truly ancient. Maybe the hurricane had uncovered a dugout canoe to go with them, hundreds or thousands of years old. Maybe it had exposed a midden made of the piled-up shells of oysters eaten by long-ago people. Or maybe that dark blotch was just an old tractor tire.

Joe asked, Is that The Cold Spot?

Faye nodded. I’m pretty sure.

Their family spent a good chunk of every August swimming at The Cold Spot, an area where the water felt chillier than the surrounding Gulf. Faye had always thought that The Cold Spot must mark a submarine spring dumping cold groundwater into the Gulf.

Maybe Joe’s photo was evidence that The Cold Spot looked totally different now. Maybe the hurricane had scoured centuries of sand and debris out of a spring vent, revealing it to Ossie’s all-seeing camera. Faye sure hoped so.

At times in ancient history, Faye’s island would have been on dry land, and so would The Cold Spot. A spring there would have been a water source for thirsty animals…and thirsty people. She knew that archaeologists had found Paleolithic tools at Wakulla Springs. They’d even found mastodon bones there. The Cold Spot might have looked a lot like Wakulla Springs, back in the day.

What could be cooler than mastodon bones and Paleolithic tools? Well, a 13,000-year-old hearth where people had once sat around a fire would be cooler, to Faye’s way of thinking. And maybe it was waiting for her, right off the coast of her very own island.

Joe, she said, trying to be nonchalant while she nearly poked a hole in the newspaper with her forefinger, want to go wading out to The Cold Spot, once we get our friends comfortable?

He grinned. Might be a few weeks before we’re home much in the daylight. And we’ll have to go when the tide is right, but our chance will come. We’ll get out there and see what the storm uncovered.

Chapter Three

Faye was behind the wheel of Joe’s car, a white Chevy Cavalier that was ancient but utterly reliable. Getting supplies to the cleanup workers was Priority One, but she had a second mission that was more selfish. She wanted more information on the mysterious dark blotch on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, and she was pretty sure she knew where to get it.

People with cash or functioning credit cards had pooled their resources for this